Travel Hacking · June 2026 · 4 min

Why we never cash our points in through the portal

45.6500° N, 10.6833° E

The single most expensive mistake people make with points is the easy button: redeeming them through the bank's travel portal. Same points, a fraction of the value. Here's the math that changed how we book everything.

If you take one thing from anything we write about points, take this: don’t redeem them in the portal.

The portal is the “book travel with points” button inside your bank’s app. It feels like the obvious move — you’ve got points, here’s the button, click it. And it’s where most people quietly hand back everything they earned.

The math

When you book through a bank travel portal, your points are worth a fixed rate — somewhere around 1 to 1.5 cents each. That’s the bank’s number, and it doesn’t move.

When you instead transfer those same points to an airline or hotel partner and book an award seat or night, the value floats — and it floats up. A typical partner redemption runs around 2 cents a point. Book a business-class seat that sells for $3,000 with about 80,000 points, and you’re getting close to 4 cents a point. The good premium-cabin sweet spots can hit 5 to 10.

Same points. Three to ten times the value. The only difference is which button you pressed.

Chris Hutchins — whose All The Hacks podcast is where we sharpened a lot of this — puts the value ladder simply: cash out at Amazon and a point’s worth about half a cent; the portal, about a cent; a good transfer-partner award, two to five cents and up. The portal is the floor, not the play.

The sequence we actually run

Know the trip — roughly where, roughly when.
Search it as an award first. We use AwardTool (it’s the most consistent in our experience, and it’s Hutchins’ pick too). See what a partner redemption costs.
Do the math: cash price ÷ points needed. If it clears about 2 cents a point, transfer and book the award.
Only if the award is bad or the seats aren’t there, fall back to the portal or cash.

That last step matters, which brings us to the honest part.

The exception nobody mentions

Transfers are one-way and final, and they only work if the partner actually has award space. For cheap domestic economy — a $180 hop to Denver — the portal often wins, and transferring would be a mistake. So the rule isn’t “always transfer.” It’s “always check the award math before you let the portal decide for you.” Ninety seconds of looking is the whole difference.

This is one move out of the dozen or so that fund our travel year. The full set — the cards in order, the sweet spots, the kid logistics — lives in our travel-hacking playbook.